The Trumpists Have Finally Shown Us How Insane, Violent, and Idiotic They Really Are

The Trumpists’ Violent Tantrum Tells Us Exactly What They’d Do If They Ever Regained Power

Image Credit: Cristobal Herrera-Ulaskevich

umair haque

 August 12, 2022

The Trumpists. Ah, Christ. The Trumpists. Do you remember the world before these idiots, lunatics, fascists, and morons invaded decided what we all really needed was a rerun of the 1930s, only with MAGA baseball hats? It wasn’t perfect, but still. It was OK. It’s like remembering the world before Covid. Hard to do, anymore.

I know. You know. But this time? We’ve reached the end of a certain thing. The Trumpists have shown us who they really are. It’s true that they’ve been showing us, all along. They’d lift their veil, and beneath it, you’d catch a glimpse of a corpse’s face, crawling with maggots. They’d take off those idiot MAGA caps, and there, right there, where a brain should have been, and a skull around it, you’d just see a black hole, covered in pus, pulsating with hate.

But now? It’s different. They’ve finally taken it all off. They’re standing there naked. Now there’s no doubt. This is who they really really are.

What do I mean by all this? Well, consider the events of the last few days.

The FBI raided “Mar a Lago,” Orange Hitler’s fancifully named tacky dictator’s Potemkin mansion. And in response, the entire Trump-o-sphere lit up like it was the inverse Fourth of July.

Instead of saying things that might be, I don’t know, vaguely normal in a democracy, the Trumpists finally took off the veil altogether. They just threw all the garb of even attempting to hew to democracy’s or modernity’s ideals anymore, in a giant explosive baby tantrum of sadistic brutality.

Let’s go through a few of the choice things they said. They threatened civil war. They threatened the FBI. They issued proclamations of open, outright violence. Mass violence, aimed at…what, precisely? The everyday exercise of justice, which of course is one of democracy’s fundamental not just abstract values, but commonplace processes.

One called it “a perversion of justice.” Another, a “preemptive coup.” The insanity ranged from “[This] is the rogue behavior of communist countries, NOT the United States of America!!!” to “Failure is not an option. We must destroy the FBI.”

A Trump supporter who posted often on Trump’s social network TruthSocial attempted to shoot up an FBI branch, after posting on the social network, “If you don’t hear from me, it is true I tried attacking the F.B.I.”

The Trumpists could have waited. They could have shown some restraint, some humility, some moderation, wiser counsel could have prevailed. But that was a stretch, because of course a zombie is hardly going to sit there and take the GRE. They are who they are, and now we know who they really really are.

Let me assure you that as a scholar and survivor of social collapse it’s profoundly, totally, off-the-charts abnormal for people to react like the Trumpists did. Nobody in a democracy is above the law. Not just “not even” a former head of state, but especially not. Civil servants in the highest offices must follow the law scrupulously, because of course they have all the more cause and power to break it, should they so choose.

And Trump’s behavior was hardly, well, above reproach. Let’s take a moment to — shudder — remember the Trump years. The pattern? An escalating sequence of abuses of power. The Trumpists might not want to admit it, but, for example, the very first year Trump was in power, Stern, one of Germany’s major magazines, published an issue with him doing a Hitler salute on the cover. The entire world knew that the word “Trump” was synonymous with “abuse of power,” from the ridiculous, like appointing his son-in-law and daughter, people with zero experience in governance, as “special advisors,” — to the grotesque, like “family separations,” which the last Nuremberg Prosecutor warned were literal crimes against humanity, fascist level.

The pattern, in other words was clear. The FBI raid, therefore, was hardly some kind of bolt from the blue. It came, after all, on the heels of numerous investigations, from the January 6th Committee’s to New York State’s. American democracy was trying to find some accountability for those long four years of shocking, flagrant abuses of power. To put that another way, if there hadn’t been a raid on a former President like Trump, that would have been more shocking in a modern democracy. That there was one was a signal American democracy’s heart was still beating.

Now let’s come to the raison d’être for the raid. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or to cry. The FBI searched Trump’s tacky estate…looking for…nuclear secrets. Pause for a moment to take that in, because it implies the FBI thinks that a former President stole nuclear secrets from the White House.

This is the erstwhile stuff of Hollywood thrillers and paranoid 1970s spy novels, and yet…here we are. A former American President is under a cloud of suspicion for possibly having stolen top secret nuclear documents. LOL — like I said. Laugh or cry?

It hardly takes a genius to instantly connect the dots here, because they’re the size of Jupiter and blinking bright red. Who helped put Trump in power? Russia did, with numerous military intelligence operations, as we know now. Everything from hacking Hillary’s emails — which the FBI fell for, leaving James Comey an international laughingstock and a name disgraced within America — to operations as of yet still uncovered. Russia’s head of state — another crazy dictator — has long been suspected of being a little too friendly with Trump, and now we know there was a literal meeting where installing Trump as President was priority number one among Russia’s various military intel agencies, decided personally by the head of state.

The dots? They connect themselves. After all, why exactly would you steal…nuclear secrets? Imagine you were the President. Maybe you grew wistful on your last day in the Oval Office, and you said to yourself, man, I’m going to miss this knick-knack Emanuel Macron gave me, even it’s just a bronze block of Camembert. Ah, man, I’m really going to miss this cool portrait of me with Justin Trudeau. Nobody’s going to notice. I’ll just…take them with me. Sorry, still not allowed. But understandable.

Nuclear secrets, though? Why would you take those with you? What, you need them because in your next career, you’re going to become a nuclear physicist? Or, wait, maybe you need them because you just grew so fond of them. Come now. The number of reasons a head of state hangs onto secret nuclear documents is incredibly small, it consists of exactly one item, and it’s incredibly disturbing to even have to think about, and that’s before you get to the context that it’s now a fact of modern history that Russia helped install Trump.

Why does all that matter?

This is who the Trumpists really, really are. Now we know the absolute bottom limit of their depravity. They’re willing to:

— go to war with the rest of America,

— for a President who’s their own personal demagogue,

— even if said President stole nuclear secrets,

— to give to another country,

— that America’s currently on the brink of war with.

Think about all that for a minute, because it’s actually mind-boggling. You see, civil wars are one thing. They’re understandable. Happen all the time, over minor differences. You’re Sunni? I’m Shia. Let’s fight! You want this city? No, we want this city. Bang-bang. On it goes. But this? This is completely different. It’s on another level completely.

The Trumpists are so bereft of honor, decency, courage, reason, logic, working minds, history — anything at all — that they’re willing to back their demagogue to the hilt even if it means threatening civil war on the rest of America over modern history’s possible worst case of treason. They’re willing to start civil war over treason. They’re willing to double down on treason, with outright mass violence.

LOL. It’s laughable, and it’s frankly a little pathetic. Because while the Trumpists talk a good game, they’re all talk. If it came to full on civil war in America…well, it wouldn’t. Because while the Trumpists think having a closetful of rifles and a suit of body armor an overweight forty-something guy can’t fit into is preparation for combat…on the other side are America’s armed forces. And it’s eminently clear who’s side they’d be on. Not the Trumpists. Even if there are a few bad seeds willing to commit treason — guess what the penalty for disobeying orders at that level is? You don’t want to know. And neither do they, but it involves your life and future ending pretty damned fast.

There’s not going to be a civil war like that in America — no matter how hard the Trumpists crave it, no matter if it’s their own personal Pornhub. Sorry, not going to happen. It’d take less than, what, one platoon of Marines to dispense with all these jokers, in ways they’d never see coming and really wouldn’t like.

And yet that’s the depth of their depravity. It’s really, really important to understand that fact. They’re out there begging for civil war at this point. Asking for it. Over what? Over treason, even though of course civil war is itself treason.

This is why I said the mind boggles. Civil wars start for all kinds of reasons — religion, resources, poverty. But being willing to start one to defend a demagogue under suspicion of stealing nuclear secrets? Whew. Even most “third world” countries would balk at that. Even their extremists and fanatics would be like, “Well, OK, maybe that’s a step too far, and that guy needs a dose of justice. Whatever our differences, even we’re not on the side of selling it all out to our shared, common enemies.”

So what is all this? This is a few things. This is an extreme case of social delusion — a social group of nutcases with a few rifles actually thinking they’re going to be able to take on a trained military, no less the American military. It’s fascism, though, in that sense — they’re willing to go that far to build the ideal society they want. Because the reason they’re still rallying around their Dear Leader, of course, is that he still promises them the purified, cleansed society of their dreams — a society in which only the pure of blood and true of faith are “real” people, and the rest merely subhumans. And in that sense, this is the final level.

We now know who the Trumpists really are. Are they really…crazy, insane, delusional, bananas? Yup. To the extent they’re willing to kill the rest of us, in order to defend their demagogue, even in a case of what begins to look a whole lot like the highest crime in the book. Are they really stupid, idiotic, moronic? Sure, in the sense that they really think that threatening outright violence and having a gun locker is a match for even one platoon of real soldiers, and somehow, all that’s going to bring down democracy. Are they really this venal, backwards, and, well, fascist? Sure — they’re defending their demagogue because he promises them the purified society of their dreams, and that matters more to them than, say, the Constitution, Oaths of Office, the rule of law, democracy.

Now. That’s not to say they’re not dangerous. In fact, all the above is a testament to how dangerous these lunatics really are. Because leaving the extreme case of civil war aside, they do have a sophisticated plan to seize power. 50 January 6ths, which “steal back” the next election. A purge of the government afterwards, and its replacement, in totum, by hardliners and loyalists, meaning everyone from your mailman to your new Stasi agent keeps tabs on you and makes sure you’re not “aiding and abetting” women, minorities, gays, immigrants, “libruls,” all of which is now a crime.

That plan has every chance of succeeding.

And now we know what happens if it does. See these lunatics talking this openly about this much violence? It tells us how far they’re willing to go. If they’re threatening and screaming right now this much brutality — imagine how much worse it’ll be if they ever get their hands on the levers of power, where nothing’s left in the way of abusing power. Now it should be crystal clear to everyone that the Trumpists are bona fide fascists, who are not just willing to do very real violence in the name of their demagogue and their fantasy utopia-Reich — but are eager, standing ready to do such violence.

And that makes the plan to seize American democracy that much more dangerous, because now the stakes are not just real — but lethal. They’ve now openly said how much they genuinely want violence done against the rest — average Americans, functioning institutions, anyone on the side of democracy and justice and peace. Imagine what happens if they get the power to do it.

Then, there really will only be one way out left for America, and it involves the military, which will be cautious about going there. Things must not get to that point. And that means it’s incumbent upon every sane American left to understand, finally, who the Trumpists really, really are. You might have doubted that they hated the rest, that they wanted to do violence, that they’d stoop that low just to defend their demagogue, no matter how disgusting the acts he’d been found out to have committed. Now you know.

They’re not like the rest of us. They’re a lot more like the Taliban, ISIS, like revolutionary movements prepared to assassinate and kill their former neighbors and friends and allies. This is where America really is. Now you know exactly what’ll happen if it falls back into the hands of the Trumpists — because they’re out there screaming it at the top of their lungs. They’re baying for blood, and snarling for violence.

It’s time to put all doubts aside, and accept the reality that this is who this social group really is. Because this, too, must be the final knowledge — we’re willing to kill, start a civil war, intimidate, beat, threaten, hurt the rest of you, just to protect our demagogue, no matter what he does — that this social group is a profound threat to democracy, modernity, peace, justice, truth, decency. And therefore the central goal of the rest must be to prevent them from ever gaining power again, because, well, now there is absolutely no shred of doubt left about who they really are, what they really want, and how low they are willing to go.

umair haque

                  

The Planet Is Sending Us a Message — And It’s Terrifying

This Is Extinction — And Now You’re Living IT

Aerial view of a forest fire area near Saint-Magne, south-western France.

 Image Credit: Agence France-Presse Handout

umair haque

 August 13, 2022

I have an admission to make. I was wrong.

I thought — and I wrote — that it would take probably until 2030 or so. To get here.

But let me let the people on the front lines of this calamity speak to you directly themselves.

““There’s nothing left to eat,’ one farmer, Laurent Roux, told the local radio station France Bleu. ‘The terrain is so dry that in places, it looks like ash. It’s dust.’

“‘Our vines are suffering,’ said vintner Xavier Collart Dutilleul, who, with his wife Pascale, runs Château Mazeris Bellevue near Saint-Emilion in southwestern France. Lacking rain, the organic vineyard’s parched clay-rich soil is ‘almost as hard as cement,’ he told Yahoo News, and he predicted that his harvest, which typically yields enough for 35,000 bottles, will be down by 30% this year.”

“We have no water,” said Fabrizio Rizzotti, a seventh-generation rice farmer. ‘The plants are curling up and dying in the fields.’ This year, he expects his harvest of carnaroli rice, favored for risotto, to be 30% of what it was last year.”

“In Spain, which provides nearly half the world’s olive oil, Agricultural Minister Luis Planas last week warned that ‘this year’s olive harvest could be notably lower than previous ones.’ Spain’s Association of Young Farmers and Ranchers (Asaja) predicts that olive yields will drop by a third.”

“‘What’s happening this year is very scary,’ enologist Ton Mata, third-generation owner and CEO of the Recaredo vineyard in Spain’s cava region, Alt Penedès, told Yahoo News. ‘We have little rain and a very long, dry, hot period with three heat waves. We are seeing that the grapes are very small and weigh less.’ Although the harvest is just beginning, he’s sure that the yield will be down by 20% to 40%.”

“…The corn harvest is expected to be 18.5% lower this year and farmers said other cereal and fruit and vegetable crops were suffering.”

“Some of the crops hit by the drought include:

• Onions and carrots. U.K. growers expect losses of 30 to 40 percent for carrots and at least 25 percent for onions.
• Potatoes. At least 25 percent of Germany’s harvest is likely to be affected.
• Corn. Around 60 percent has been destroyed in the Netherlands.
• Cereals like wheat, barley and oats. At least 35 percent of the harvest has been lost in Sweden.”

“The drought has hit Denmark particularly hard, with the spring harvest of grains and vegetables down 40 to 50 percent, according to Troels Toft, an official with the Danish Agriculture and Food Council. He estimates that the losses will cost the country’s farming industry around $944 million.”

Meanwhile, India stopped exporting wheat because “extremely hot weather” (LOL, aka climate catastrophe) caused such a drop in wheat production, the country needed to save the harvest for itself.

Did you get all that? I’m not trying to overwhelm you, but if you feel overwhelmed, you should be.

The planet is sending us a message, and it’s terrifying.

But are we listening?

Let me start over with what I was wrong about, exactly. I said — thought, forecast, predicted, whatever you’d like to call it — that it would take us getting to the end of this decade or so for this to happen. What is “this”? For “climate change” — Extinction — to cause genuine and immediate catastrophic system failures to our civilization.

But, like I said, I was wrong. It didn’t take until the end of this decade. It is happening now. And it’s just 2022. That is flat-out terrifying.

Why? Am I just fear-mongering? Just trying to scare you?

My friends, when Europe’s crops are beginning to fall by 30%, in some cases 50%, that is about as grave a calamity as a society can begin to experience. It is a really big deal.

But you know what the irony is? Most people don’t think so. They see these desperate farmers, going bankrupt, absolutely shocked at the way the planet’s changed before their very eyes — and they ignore them. I’ve been talking with people about this. Just average people. At my little European dog park. And you know what? Nobody cares. The general attitude is blasé. Shrug — so what? We’ll get by. Ah, but will we?

Let me say. We are now beginning to experience widespread, massive crop failures as a result of “climate change.” Get that far, and at least you begin to understand something. But even that’s a poor, limited way to think of it. A better way? Extinction is coming. For our water and our crops. They are dying too.

So what about us?

The reason that most people don’t think any of this matters is sadly, very simple. My little dog park is in an affluent neighborhood, in a rich city. It’s full of city people, who are my friends and neighbors. But the last thing they are is farmers. To them, the production of basics — water, food, energy, medicine — is an abstraction. They can feel the heat in the park itself, and see the dogs panting, and even coo over them. But they are unable to really make the link between Extinction and Catastrophe — between climate change and the crop failure and what happens as a result of it.

Cities are concentrations of power and wealth. In our societies, money and authority reside there. And cities, throughout history, make the same mistake. They ignore the signals coming from the edges. The places which produce things. Cities don’t produce much — they never have. Whether it’s agriculture or manufacturing, things have been produced outside the avenues of power and fortune. And so just as Rome ignored the barbarians, so too, we’re ignoring the signals coming from the edges of our industrial-carbon empire.

But listen. Listen to the farmers. The way they are speaking about what is happening to the planet is absolutely shocking and terrifying. The despair and sorrow in their words points to something almost inexpressible. They speak of death, my friends. Of soil turned to ashes, of livestock dying, of crops withering. Our farmers are now speaking the language of Extinction.

But we are not listening, and by not listening, we’re making just the same mistake so, so many civilizations have — from Rome to Athens and beyond. In comfortable air-conditioned bubbles in great cities, the rest of us assume, blithely, that things will just…go on. Hey! I do my job, right! That’s their job! The farmer’s job is to farm! They’ll figure it out. And then, having gotten angry about things they know nothing about, city dwellers add insult to ignorance — and tell farmers to “just grow something else” or “just move north” or what have you. We’re not listening.

So let me say it again.

We are now in an era where some of climate change’s most dramatic and shocking impacts are already beginning to be felt. Our crops are failing and our water supplies are drying up. Extinction is coming for our water and food, and there’s nothing more basic than that.

And more than that, it wasn’t supposed to happen for another decade. Why does that matter? It matters intensely. For the following reason. You see, the world, such as it is, the political world, has a loose agreement to reach “net zero” by 2050. And for the last decade or so, it’s been thought, by politicians, leaders, pundits, that that would be OK. We’d have some brushes with disaster, but get things right by 2050, and the worst impacts of climate change would have been averted.

We’d be living on a hotter planet — but not that much hotter, one just a degree or a half warmer. There’d be a few hot days every now and then — but we’d get by. Without systemic transformation, meaning that our systems for water and agriculture and manufacturing could go on much as they were. Geographically, financially, temporally, spatially, energetically — they could use the same resources, and produce the same yields, and therefore, us city dwellers, who have all the money and power, would go on living our comfortable, cosseted lives, and through all that, democracy would be just fine in the end.

But all of that is being unravelled at the most fundamental level now. Because if we’re beginning to face dramatic, shocking impacts of climate change like mass droughts and crop failures now, in 2022 — when they weren’t supposed to happen for another decade or so — then what hope do we really have of making it to 2050?

Let me put that more concretely. Take any of the statistics about crop failures above — which come again, straight from the sources themselves. Olives, down 30%, corn, 20%, carrots and onions 25%, grapes, 30% — doesn’t matter which one. You don’t have to think very hard to understand the terrifying conclusion. This is just 2022. What happens by 2030? What happens when an entire country — or continent’s — yield of basic crops is down by 50%?

The answer is frightening, and I’m sure I don’t have to spell it out for you. Inflation sets in, prices skyrocket, people panic, shortages ensue, food has to be rationed, everything comes apart. Democracy begins to fail, people turn on each other, demagogues find convenient scapegoats for these woes — just as they’ve done for everything else recently — and there’s a Big Bang of authoritarian fascism, as societies plunge into poverty, instability, and chaos.

We are in an incredibly serious situation. We don’t understand that we’re in one, because nobody’s listening to the people on the Front Lines of Extinction. Farmers. Hydrologists. Climate scientists. We’re all ignoring them, in increasingly shamefully idiotic ways. Hey — what’s Captain America wearing now!? OMG!! Look, it’s the Marvel Cinematic Universe!!

(My God, the stupidity actually hurts. These days, the planet’s literally dying before our eyes, and the average person cares more about superheroes, like a goddamned four year old. And then they get mad at me when I point it out. Farmers and hydrologist and scientists are out there begging, pleading to be heard, but no. We’ve regressed into infantile narcissism, and nothing can tear us puerile city dwellers away from our new creature comforts — superhero movies, instaculture, plastic surgery, fake friends on apps, making fools’ games of what could have been lives. But I digress, I just find it unbelievably idiotic that people are like this.)

What would you call it if you were running out of food and water? Sorry — not the city dweller’s way, as in the easy, baffled answer of “But I’ll just…go to the store!” I mean: what if you were really running out of food and water? Imagine yourself hiking and lost, or camping and you fell and injured yourself, or trapped in some infernal maze — doesn’t matter. Just: what would you call it?

You’d call it an emergency.

That is what we’re in now. Not the way we were before — the abstract, “long” emergency, in which one distant day, something bad would, might, could, happen, far in the future, according to some nerd, with some math, and some facts. Yawn. Who cares? Not that kind of emergency. We’re in a real one. An immediate one. An existential emergency.

It is no joke when crop failure and droughts this severe afflict a planet from Europe to America to India and beyond. We city dwellers have to wake up. We are making the same mistake civilizations have made before us. We ignore the signals from the regions, hinterlands, fields, at our peril. Our ignorance goes on to cost everyone their futures, because power and money reside with us, but we are too lazy and indolent to lift much of a finger fast enough.

When I talk to my city dwelling friends about all this, their mental model of what climate change does is totally inadequate. They rationalize it, amazingly enough, by saying to me, in short, “Yeah, it’s getting hotter. But a few hot days? So what! I’ll survive…and so will everything else!”

But everything else is not a city dweller. My friends make the mistake of applying their experience to everything, instead of trying to widen their experience.

What do “a few hot days” really do? They kill. They kill crops. They dry up water sources. They turn the fields to ash.

My city dwelling friends don’t appear to understand this simple fact at all. They appear to think that because they can survive “a few hot days,” so can everything else. But that is eminently not the case. The ‘few hot days’ are, in actuality, peaks of extreme heat, in a rapidly warming climate — and those peaks of extreme heat, coupled with rapid warming, are absolute killers. For what? For the basics of our civilization. Food, water, medicine, energy, yes even energy — think of how Britain’s energy supplies are now threatened, and it’s planning for blackouts, because droughts in Norway have reduced what it can power Britain with.

We are in an existential emergency. It will last decades. The serious “impacts of climate change” are now arriving. They are crossing the threshold from theory to reality, and we are beginning now to experience them, in terrifying ways. First we had megafires and megafloods. Now we have mass crop failures and megadroughts. See the acceleration?

It wasn’t supposed to happen this fast. But it is. And we aren’t listening. To the message the planet is sending us. To the message all those on the Front Lines of Extinction have for the rest of us.

This isn’t a Marvel Movie you’re watching, it’s not the goddamned Avengers Versus Octo-Spider-Bat-Super-Man, this isn’t a comic book your glazed eyes are reading, this isn’t a theory you’re debating, this isn’t an app to swipe right on and giggle. And you’re not a goddamned four year old. You’re an adult. This is something we need to face, head on.

This is Extinction. And you’re living it.

umair haque

 

Use of facial recognition technology gets mixed reviews

Black respondents were generally skeptical about its use, but some say it's OK in come cases

Ray Marcano | THE GRIO
Aug 13, 2022


The use of facial recognition technology gets mixed responses from Black people, with some deeming it acceptable in certain instances but a larger share having reservations about the tool than those of other races.

Those are the results of a Pew Research Center poll last month that examined the use of facial recognition technology by police.

“We’ve asked some questions around facial recognition software a couple of years ago and again we see some patterns in which Black Americans stand out as being less accepting, more skeptical,” Monica Anderson, Pew’s associate director of research, told theGrio. “That’s one of the key takeaways for me, not just in this survey, but we saw it in some previous work as well.”

In this Oct. 7, 2020, file photo, a video surveillance camera is installed on the ceiling above a subway platform in the Court Street station in the Brooklyn borough of New York.

 (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)

The survey, released on July 14, found that 29% of Black Americans believe law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology would make policing less fair. Just 22% believed it would make policing more fair, far lower than Hispanics (40%) and whites (36%) surveyed by Pew.

The survey also showed that almost half of Black people (48%) believe authorities would use the technology to monitor neighborhoods of color more often than others. Some 28% of Black respondents believe authorities would use the technology to make false arrests.

Even putting in safeguards isn’t enough to quell the suspicion.

“They were less likely, for example, to say things like (the technology) would be better if people without criminal records could opt out of the facial recognition database,” Anderson noted. “They also were not necessarily sold on the idea that training would be the thing that would help mitigate errors.



“What we see with Black Americans is even additional things like training notifications, having people opt out, they were still less likely to be on board with” the technology, Anderson added.

Interestingly, the poll also showed almost half of all Americans, regardless of race, favored using the technology to monitor protests. Overall, 46% of Americans, including 4 in 10 Black respondents, said the use of the technology would be good for society.



Emily Vogels, a research associate at Pew, noted the seeming disparity in the answers.

“There are some interesting things going on where we see this thread of concerns and skepticism where Black adults stand out, but then other times see that their views are very similar to adults from other racial and ethnic backgrounds,” she told theGrio.

The survey isn’t the last word, rather it’s another step in the process of understanding how Black Americans feel about facial recognition technology and its use.

There’s a complicating factor in that some people might not truly understand what facial recognition technology is and how it works.

In short, the technology matches a face against an image to determine a possible match. Black Americans aren’t the only group skeptical about its use. The American Civil Liberties has been a leader in fighting the use of the technology, calling it a “threat to our privacy and civil liberties.”

They also note the case of Robert Williams, a Detroit man arrested and held in jail for 30 hours based on a faulty identification. Williams, with the help of the ACLU and the University of Michigan Law School’s Civil Rights Litigation Initiative, filed a lawsuit against the Detroit Police Department.

Additionally, the New York Times has reported about two other Black men were jailed based on a bad match.

Also Read:
Robots became racist after AI training, always chose Black faces as ‘criminals’

Anderson noted the correlation between the findings in this survey and ones in the past that examined trust and policing.

“Although this survey particularly didn’t ask specific questions about attitudes about policing, we know from past research there’s wide gaps when it comes to attitudes about fairness and policing,” Anderson said.

“Black Americans [stand] out as being particularly skeptical, less trustworthy, more concerned about what’s happening nationwide, and what’s happening in their local communities.”

Meet a Canadian man who's sharing his vasectomy experience to encourage men there and in the US post-Roe v. Wade

Yelena Dzhanova

Olivier Charbonneau. Courtesy of Olivier Charbonneau

Olivier Charbonneau, a 28-year-old from Canada, got a vasectomy in November.

When the Supreme Court decided to overturn Roe v. Wade, he shared his experience on Facebook.

"You are not dancing tango alone, so we have to share the responsibility," he said, encouraging other men to get one, too.

The news of the the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade enraged Olivier Charbonneau — even though he doesn't live in the US.

The 28-year-old is from Canada and had gotten a vasectomy just months before the Supreme Court decision. And once the news dropped, he used social media to persuade other men to do the same.

"Vasectomy is a safe alternative to female birth control. Contraception is not only on women but on us men," he wrote in a lengthy Facebook post in June. "Be smart, make the right choice."

In an interview with Insider, Charbonneau said he had noticed that only his female friends had ever spoken or thought about birth control.

"Women were talking about how shocked they were about what happening in the US," he said. "But men, they were all silent. No one was talking about it."

Despite the fact that he does not live in the US, Charbonneau said the news is still applicable to him and to other Canadians. Even though the decision was teased in May, when Politico published a draft Supreme Court opinion signaling a reversal of Roe v. Wade, the news shocked Charbonneau, because, he said, "it's not impossible that people will try to do the same here."

"Here in Canada, we are kind of protected," he said. "But what will happen if it were here, if the loss of rights were in Canada instead?"

At the same time, speaking out in favor of vasectomies is a way to show solidarity with women in the US, he said.

"I realized that we had stepped back for the progression of the woman's rights," he said. "We are taking a step back, we're taking away rights."

He added, "I think in the US, I'm like, 'Whoa, it's a huge, huge regression about the rights. You can't even decide if you want to keep it or not."

The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, leaving the legality of abortion in the hands of individual states.

By overturning Roe, the Supreme Court has essentially made it illegal in at least 22 states to obtain an abortion. Additional restrictions are expected in several other states.

DON'T WANT TO GET CUT THEN FOLLOW THE ADVICE

Charbonneau got his vasectomy done in November last year at age 27. He was in a relationship at the time and he didn't want the burden of birth control to fall exclusively on his girlfriend, he said.

"You are not dancing tango alone, so we have to share the responsibility," he told Insider.

He described the procedure as a simple process that took about two weeks. He pointed out that women have a harder time getting access to reproductive healthcare.

In Canada, "They're going to tell you, 'Oh, you're too young. ... But one day you're going to want to have [a] kid,'" he said. "So it's very hard for women here" to get preventative reproductive care that will prohibit the possibility of getting pregnant.

"It's painless. It was free. It was covered by the health insurance," he said.

Since speaking out about his own vasectomy, Charbonneau said men have been asking him about the process, seemingly because they're considering getting one themselves.

"People are curious about it," he said, adding that he wants men "to understand that they have responsibilities in the birth control" world.

CRIMINAL CYBER CAPITALI$M
Google ordered to pay $43 million by Australian court for misleading users
August 13, 2022

Australia's Federal Court has ordered Google to pay A$60 million ($42.7 million) in penalties for misleading users on collection of their personal location data, reports Reuters.

The court found Google breached Australia’s Consumer Law between January 2017 and December 2018 by misleading customers about location data collected through their Android devices.

The court previously found that Google had breached the Australian Consumer Law by representing to some Android users that a setting titled “Location History” was the only setting that affected whether Google used personally identifiable data about a user’s location. However, another Google account setting — “Web & App Activity” — also enabled Google to collect, store and use personally identifiable location data, according to Australia’s Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC.)